Last weekend we went to Santo Domingo. The city is really big and it´s fun to walk around in. We spent a lot of time in La Zona Colonial, which is where there a lot of firsts for the New World and extremely old buildings. There´s the first hospital constructed (around 1500), the first university, the homes of some Columbusses, and the list goes on. It´s very historical and old looking, and it was fun to be there. We went to the beach at Guayacanes on Sunday, which is about 45 minutes East of Santo Domingo. The beach was very pretty, but it rained pretty much the entire time we were there.

This weekend we went to a very small town on the outskirts of Jamao, which is also, interestingly enough, a very small town. Paulina, a French Canadian, has over the years adopted some 20 kids and built a school to educate them and other kids from the community. We went there with a group of 15 of us from the program, which is almost all of us. We got there on Friday night and played with the kids. It gets dark fairly early here, which is a bummer. It got dark around 7 and we enjoyed the rusticness of a home that runs most of the time without electricity. We carried around flashlights and candles and tried to avoid the wildlife.

On Saturday we got to work. Paulina wanted us to help build the foundation for benches for her students to be able to wait on. Our job then was to go around the premesis collecting rocks and sand. In order to get sand, we had to walk about .5 miles to the river, fill up a burlap sack with about 4 shovel-fuls of sand, throw it over our shoulder, and traipse back up a very steep and rocky hill to the place where they were mixing cement. In case you were wondering, it was indeed uphill both ways. To say we sweat a little would be the biggest understatement ever uttered. We were all drenched with sweat, and dirty from walking around in the dirt. We went swimming in the river there, but it was pretty dirty from the rain, and the current was ferocious. Yet it was much more comfortable than being so sweaty, and so we enjoyed the break. I feel very bad for the pile of obscenely dirty laundry that my host mom is about to wash.

Saturday night we encountered WAYYYY too much wildlife. I had laughed early Saturday when some people from my group found out that there were tarantulas here and were contemplating flying back to the US immediately. However, I reevaluated my stay as well when I saw what happened when it rains and spiders don´t want to be wet—they come inside. The paranoia in my cabin Saturday night was remarkable, but with good reason. Those spiders were LARGE. We killed more innocent spiders than I care to admit, as I usually let spiders live. However, when it comes down to having to sleep in the same room as thousands of large, hairy crawly beasts, I choose to try to not let them outnumber me. I sort of wish we had taken pictures to post of this, but we frankly didn´t want to remember how gross the whole event was.

The highlight of Sunday in the Campo was that I helped wash a 500 pound pig. I got in its cage and, well, didn´t do much to wash it. Really, I did this mostly for the photo-op. But I did dump some water on the big guy. This picture was supposed to be me posing nicely with the clean pig, but it suddenly jolted very close to my face, and the picture was taken in the middle of my panicked reaction.

This week, we have a holiday from school on Wednesday due to the holiday of a patron saint for the Dominican Republic. So I´m looking at a rough little 3 day school week. =) Studying in the Caribbean is rough; let me tell ya. =)

I put up some more pictures and decided to share them the lazy way. So rather than uploading them onto here, they´re here:  http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059129&l=a4f2b&id=15300570  i just added them to the old album so you´ll have to check out the old ones first.